We are delighted to collect in this volume some of the papers presented during the 1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance. This workshop was motivated by the launching of the H2020 project LYNX. The workshop took place in Luxembourg, on December 13 th 2017, as a joint activity within the 30 th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX2017).
Technologies for regulatory compliance are at the second stage of their hype cycle, and we believe that the peak of inflated expectations have been surpassed. Business compliance has been attracting significant attention since the enactment the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act in July 2002. According to the existing surveys, business compliance studies reached their zenith in 2009. Since 2009 the interest has only declined slightly. In recent times, however, increasing attention is given to the new possibilities opened up by linked data, big data analysis, and the Internet of Things.
Compliance by Design has been extended from business compliance to new legal areas, such as administrative and criminal law, privacy, security, and data protection. Terms like legaltech and regtech, coined on the pattern of fintech terminology, came into popular use only in the past two years. In this early phase of what promises to be a very significant development for regulators and regulated institutions, a project supported with EU public funds is trying to leverage the potential of regtech services to overcome the barriers that prevent the full realization of a Digital Single Market in Europe: Building the Legal Knowledge Graph for Smart Compliance Services in Multilingual Europe [LYNX].
The LYNX project is based on a very simple idea: the critical mass of legal open data on the web has been reached and if duly collected, analysed and interlinked as a Legal Knowledge Graph, it will be ready to enable a new breed of multilingual services for compliance.
Companies operating internationally or wanting to branch out to other countries and markets, face significant compliance challenges to ensure compliance with a multitude of laws and regulations. The management of compliance (i.e. managing conformance to a set of laws, regulations, policies, standards or best practices) is one of the key factors of success, and the latest developments in technology enable a new types of applications that facilitate its management. In order to develop appropriate regtech products, new types of technologies and services are required. These would be based on recent advances and focused on assisting lawyers, regulators, compliance officers and, in some cases, also citizens. Institutions that employ more effective tools to support compliance management will benefit from a reduction in compliance risks and even potential reductions in fines where inadvertent and nonsystemic contraventions happen to occur. A higher level of confidence in their ability to manage compliance risks may also provide them with a competitive advantage.
The contributions included in this volume provide different perspectives regarding the vision of a collection of regulatory compliance services built on top of a Legal Knowledge Graph. During the workshop these perspectives were discussed by a multi-disciplinary group of participants, including EU officials, legal and computer science scholars and representatives from the legaltech industry. We hope that these contributions can deepen the engagement on these topics with the relevant research communities.
In Madrid, Melbourne, and Barcelona December 2017
Víctor Rodríguez Doncel Pompeu Casanovas Jorge González-Conejero
We would like to thank the Programme Committee members who provided feedback about the papers presented in this volume, the H2020 Lynx project partners whose insight was crucial to model the shared approach in this book, and the University of Luxembourg team whose diligent work organising JURIX enabled a pleasant and productive day.
In addition, we would like to acknowledge that Lynx has received funding from the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) Research and Innovation programme. The work has also been supported by project DER2016-78108-P, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain), and the Law and Policy program of the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre (Australia).